www.elsblog.org - Bringing Data and Methods to Our Legal Madness

29 April 2006

Bressman & Vandenbergh on Presidential Control

Relying on data gathered from surveys and interviews of top political officials in the U.S. EPA, Lisa Schultz Bressman and Mike Vandenbergh (both at Vanderbilt) have written Inside the Administrative State: A Critical Look at the Practice of Presidential Control. I saw this paper presentation at AALS in D.C. and it is well worth the read for those interested in presidential influence and accountability in agency decision-making. The Abstract:

From the inception of the administrative
state, scholars have proposed various models of agency decision-making
to render such decision-making accountable and effective, only to see
those models falter when confronted by actual practice. Until now, the
presidential control model has been largely impervious to this pattern.
That model, which brings agency decision-making under the direction of
the President, has strengthened over time, winning broad scholarly
endorsement and bipartisan political support. But it, like prior
models, relies on abstractions - for example, that the President
represents public preferences and resists parochial pressures - that do
not hold up as a factual matter. Although recent empirical analyses
purport to validate the model, they fall short because they examine how
the White House exercises control without considering how agencies
experience control. This Article is the first to study the practice of
presidential control from inside the administrative state. We
interviewed the top political officials at the Environmental Protection
Agency from the George H. W. Bush and Clinton Administrations during
1989-2001. Our data, which do not vary substantially between
respondents of different presidential administrations, suggest that
White House involvement is more complex and less positive than previous
accounts acknowledge. But we do not conclude that the presidential
control model lacks merit. Indeed, our respondents recognize that the
President has a role to play in controlling agency decision-making. We
therefore conclude that the presidential control model requires
reworking to remain valid in practice as well as in theory. We identify
next steps in that direction.